I had seen that everything is rooted in politics and that, whatever might be attempted, no people would ever be anything other than the nature of its government made them. So the great question of the best possible government seemed to me to reduce itself to this: "What is the nature of the government best fitted to create the most virtuous, the most enlightened, the wisest and, in fact, the best people, taking the word `best' in its highest sense?" . . . . I saw that all this was leading me to some great truths which would make for the happiness of the human race, but above all for that of my native land . . . .
A government that acts in this manner [pressing poor people into the navy] cannot be called a good parent. . . . The game laws are almost as oppressive to the peasantry as pres-warrants to the mechanic. . . . You have shewn, Sir, by your silence on these subjects, that your respect for rank has swallowed up the common feelings of humanity; you seem to consider the poor as only the live stock of an estate, the feather of hereditary nobility. (pp. 31-32)
[W]hen friends are unkind, and the heart has not the prop on which it fondly leaned, where can a tender suffering being fly but to the Searcher of hearts? and, when death has desolated the present scene, and torn from us the friend of our youth--when we walk along the accustomed path, and, almost fancying nature dead, ask, Where art thou who gave life to these well-known scenes? when memory heightens former pleasures to contrast our present prospects--there is but one source of comfort within our reach;--and in this sublime solitude the world appears to contain only the Creator and the creature, of whose happiness he is the source.--These are human feelings; but I know not of any common nature or any common relation amongst men but what results from reason. The common affections and passions equally bind brutes together; and it is only the continuity of those relations that entitles us to the denomination of rational creatures; and this continuity arises from reflection,-- from the operations of that reason which you [Edmund Burke] contemn with flippant disrespect. (pp. 95-96)
The state of society is incontestibly artificial; the power of one man over another must be always derived from convention, or from conquest; by nature we are equal. The necessary consequence is, that government must always depend upon the opinion of the governed. Let the most oppressed people under heaven once change their mode of thinking, and they are free. But the inequality of parents and children is the law of our nature, eternal and uncontrollable.--Government is very limited in its power of making men either virtuous or happy; it is only in the infancy of society that it can do any thing considerable; in its maturity it can only direct a few of our outward actions. But our moral dispositions and character depend very much, perhaps entirely, upon education.--Children indeed are weak and imbecil; but it is the imbecility of spring, and not that of autumn; the imbecility that verges towards power, and not that is already exhausted with performance. To behold heroism in its infancy, and immortality in the bud, must be a most attractive object. To mould those pliant dispositions, upon which the happiness of multitudes may one day depend, must be infinitely important. (pp. 2-3)
Almost every history textbook cites 1789 as the watershed of the modern era. (3)
One of the most fateful consequences of the revolutionary attempt to break with the past was the invention of ideology. . . . Tradition lost its givenness, and French people found themselves acting on Rousseau's conviction that the relationship between the social and the political (the social contract) could be rearranged. As disagreement over the nature of the rearrangement became apparent, different ideologies were invented in order to explain this development. Socialism, conservatism, authoritarianism, and democratic republicanism were all practical answers to the theoretical question raised by Rousseau. Rather than expressing an ideology, therefore, revolutionary politics brought ideology into being. (13)
Thanks to our [the people of the English nation's] sullen resistance to innovatoin, thanks to the cold sluggishesness of our national character, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers. We have not (as I conceive) lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century; . . . . We are not the converts of Rousseau . . . . We know that we have made no discoveries; and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born, altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption . . . . In England . . . , we still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors, of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals. . . . We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be affected . . . . We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avial themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, . . . . think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with its reason, involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in an emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moemnt of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit; and not a serises of unconnected acts. Through just prejudi e, his duty becomes a part of his nature. (181-183)